mm: introduce memalloc_retry_wait()

Various places in the kernel - largely in filesystems - respond to a
memory allocation failure by looping around and re-trying.  Some of
these cannot conveniently use __GFP_NOFAIL, for reasons such as:

 - a GFP_ATOMIC allocation, which __GFP_NOFAIL doesn't work on
 - a need to check for the process being signalled between failures
 - the possibility that other recovery actions could be performed
 - the allocation is quite deep in support code, and passing down an
   extra flag to say if __GFP_NOFAIL is wanted would be clumsy.

Many of these currently use congestion_wait() which (in almost all
cases) simply waits the given timeout - congestion isn't tracked for
most devices.

It isn't clear what the best delay is for loops, but it is clear that
the various filesystems shouldn't be responsible for choosing a timeout.

This patch introduces memalloc_retry_wait() with takes on that
responsibility.  Code that wants to retry a memory allocation can call
this function passing the GFP flags that were used.  It will wait
however is appropriate.

For now, it only considers __GFP_NORETRY and whatever
gfpflags_allow_blocking() tests.  If blocking is allowed without
__GFP_NORETRY, then alloc_page either made some reclaim progress, or
waited for a while, before failing.  So there is no need for much
further waiting.  memalloc_retry_wait() will wait until the current
jiffie ends.  If this condition is not met, then alloc_page() won't have
waited much if at all.  In that case memalloc_retry_wait() waits about
200ms.  This is the delay that most current loops uses.

linux/sched/mm.h needs to be included in some files now,
but linux/backing-dev.h does not.

Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/163754371968.13692.1277530886009912421@noble.neil.brown.name
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Dave Chinner <david@fromorbit.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Jaegeuk Kim <jaegeuk@kernel.org>
Cc: Chao Yu <chao@kernel.org>
Cc: Darrick J. Wong <djwong@kernel.org>
Cc: Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/fs/xfs/kmem.c b/fs/xfs/kmem.c
index 6f49bf39183c..c557a030acfe 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/kmem.c
+++ b/fs/xfs/kmem.c
@@ -4,7 +4,6 @@
  * All Rights Reserved.
  */
 #include "xfs.h"
-#include <linux/backing-dev.h>
 #include "xfs_message.h"
 #include "xfs_trace.h"
 
@@ -26,6 +25,6 @@ kmem_alloc(size_t size, xfs_km_flags_t flags)
 	"%s(%u) possible memory allocation deadlock size %u in %s (mode:0x%x)",
 				current->comm, current->pid,
 				(unsigned int)size, __func__, lflags);
-		congestion_wait(BLK_RW_ASYNC, HZ/50);
+		memalloc_retry_wait(lflags);
 	} while (1);
 }